Meet The Disruptors: Michael Clark of Beeby Clark + Meyler On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Information is hidden, even under the best of circumstances. Putting time aside for discovery and understanding is crucial to any endeavor, even when it appears that time is of the essence and urgency is all about. Nothing wastes time more than rash action requiring repair.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Beeby Clark + Meyler Co-founder and Principal Michael Clark.
Michael Clark is the Co-founder of the award-winning integrated communications agency for the digital age, Beeby Clark+Meyler. Founded by Modem Media alums Tom Beeby, Michael Clark and Stuart Meyler, BCM is an integrated performance marketing agency that has made a name for itself in the travel & tourism, consumer packaged goods (CPG), beverage, education, B2B, and financial services industries.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
My early career background was in Industrial Engineering, actually. I came to advertising and performance marketing over the course of a 10-year journey through international new product development. Ultimately, all successful new products need to start with the consumer and their values, attitudes and habits. As I became more immersed in the research to understand consumer motivations better, I eventually arrived at media consumption patterns and then advertising.
That’s how I ended up where I am to say. And needless to say, my career in digital marketing has been a great match for my dual interests in tech and consumer behavior.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
“Disruption” is a concept that is in the eyes of the beholder. For many advertisers or performance marketers, the way in which they organize their personnel and measure the business contributions of marketing quickly becomes outdated. There is a need to break the historic compromise between change and efficiency, so that we can achieve both flexibility and effectiveness at suitable ROI levels. Disruption then becomes about constantly adjusting your business approach to remain poised to harvest new opportunities as they appear. Teaching our clients how to build manageable disruption and change into their marketing systems is a big part of what we do.
When most people think about disruption in a business sense, they think about massive, sudden or wholesale changes. When this type of massive change is needed, there is a good chance that you are too late. You’ve waited too long. You’re acting out of desperation. That’s not where we want to be.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I once copied what I thought was a blank presentation template for a short client briefing. It turned out that the presentation template was not blank and another client’s name frequently appeared in my briefing document along with images. Thankfully, my client was very understanding and managed a good sense of humor throughout the embarrassing situation by frequently saying, “what would other client name X do.”
Learning: Check everything twice and one additional time just before the presentation begins.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
I am sure that everyone says that there are too many to name, but in many ways for me, this is true. I came from a family of entrepreneurs. My grandparents and parents each owned their own businesses, as I do today. And as a business owner, you learn a lot about the importance of retaining high-quality talent.
The best method for doing that is through common respect. The big lesson for me is that nearly all team members want to do their very best and want to maximize their potential. The leader’s role is to provide clear expectations, training, and consistent performance coaching. All delivered with respect and honesty. The people that I call mentors all did this consistently.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
This is a great question that we ponder every day as we go about our client work. The very nature of disruption is the fact that consequences are built into the change, many of which are either unforeseen or, more likely, lightly considered or ignored.
In most industries, when one or two players are extracting a vast amount of profits and everyone else is barely hanging on, that is usually a sign that disruption would be helpful — to both consumers and other industry participants and their employees. The idea of monopolies being destructive has been studied since the dawn of capitalism. New industry entrants with new novel ways of doing things generally have positive, restorative impacts on most industries. Industries with healthy levels of profit spread across a wider diversity of players usually result in continued innovation without unnatural distortion to competition and pricing. Unwelcome disruption in these circumstances usually comes in the form of government regulation, bought and paid for by one of the industry participants seeking to extract more profit than they can obtain through normal competition.
The digital media industry has been filled with such examples in recent years. Facebook’s purchase of Instagram and Whatsapp was decried as anti-competitive and Meta has been under continued scrutiny for its acquisition practices. Google’s dominance in search advertising, as well as its leading presence in video (YouTube) and display (Google Display Network), have heralded calls for industry disruption. And yet, there are still only a few browsers, with Chrome (Google, again) and Safari (Apple) accounting for roughly 85% of browser usage.
If you want to be a disruptor yourself, check out Brave (https://brave.com/compare/chrome/). Brave is an advertising-free browsing experience where consumers earn payments for their attention in the form of a cryptocurrency called BAT (Basic Attention Token).
Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
Five words of advice that have impacted me are, “Wait for the full story.” This is advice that has always served me well, both professionally and personally. We never understand anything fully at first glance. Perspective matters.
Information is hidden, even under the best of circumstances. Putting time aside for discovery and understanding is crucial to any endeavor, even when it appears that time is of the essence and urgency is all about. Nothing wastes time more than rash action requiring repair.
This advice is highly relevant to the practice of performance marketing, where results in high-stakes programs are sometimes measured hourly. Unfortunately, the pressure to act is overwhelming and pausing to think can be construed as wasting time.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
Most digital marketers are trapped in a situation where they cannot move away from last-click attribution. Therefore, the only tactics in their plans are paid search, SEO and retargeting. This is very limiting and leads to very low growth. Clients need a way to confidently add new digital channels that are increasingly non-clickable (podcasting, video). We are in the process of deploying new modeling techniques that will enable digital marketers to better attribute their investments in non-clickable digital media to business growth.
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
The Knowledge Project with Shane Parish is a podcast that I fully enjoy and would recommend to anyone. There is something new and meaningful to learn in every episode. Shane does a wonderful job pulling important lessons from his guests that are accessible to all of us. I appreciate practicality, which is why I enjoy it so much.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Experts make themselves.” This is a quote from the great Ford Harding, author of Rain Making and the founder of Harding Company. It is easy to become paralyzed waiting for someone else to confer legitimacy onto you. If you do the research and write a compelling article, guess what? You’re the expert. So, get started. Do something.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
I would probably try and do something around plant-based nutrition. I learned later in life the importance of proper nutrition and I think some degree (any degree) of more plants, less animal products and oils would benefit everyone greatly.
How can our readers follow you online?
LinkedIn is the best place to find and follow me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelkclark/
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Meet The Disruptors: Michael Clark of Beeby Clark + Meyler On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
